


Mother's Day

by Valentine



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Charles can't help caring, Erik makes bad decisions, Gen, Not A Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 03:01:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1882626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valentine/pseuds/Valentine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Magneto doesn't like to remember that before he was Magneto he was Erik because Erik couldn't save his family.  Magneto doesn't intend to fail his new family no matter what Charles says about his methods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mother's Day

**Author's Note:**

> This is hopefully the beginning of a much longer story if I can write it around the works I already have in progress. The idea popped into my head and wouldn't let go until I'd at least written a little.

Erik dies on a Tuesday.  Charles feels it happen from two thousand miles away in the never ending space between a last breath and a last heartbeat. 

 

A mutant killed him, a scared child that had never manifested powers before.  A little girl whose mother shoved her under her desk when the ceiling sheared off the building and Magneto hung in the air backlit by the sun like an avenging angel.  He’d come to break into a lab that he believed was experimenting on mutants.  He was right, but he never made it past the now roofless first floor.

 

The lab was buried thirty floors below ground, staffed by guards and a handful of scientists.  Emily Richardson didn’t know that.  She was the receptionist at what she thought was a small storage facility for unsold merchandise being resold to discount stores.  She signed for deliveries and then buzzed the garage open in the back.  She never saw what they unloaded or even went into the garage herself.  She kept to her little first floor office with its closet full of dusty office supplies.  She spent most of her day writing children’s stories for her daughter to illustrate when she got home.  Nominally she had a boss.  He came by at 5pm sharp everyday to take the keys and “tour the premises” he’d say as he watched her pick up her bag and head out the door before he’d take his first step past her desk.

 

Emily stood tall despite her shaking knees and pushed her desk chair carefully with her foot trying to hide her daughter without drawing attention to her.  Her “what do you want?” was spoken loudly even though there was a bit of a wobble at the end.  Internally she was praying and cursing in equal measures.  Her wonderful, amazing, genius little girl was supposed to be home with her nanny.  A nanny that had ungraciously called in sick five minutes before Emily had to leave for work.  And now her Sara was cowering under a desk while a caped madman is hovering where there should be a roof.

 

“I want what I have always wanted.  Freedom for my brothers and sisters!  Freedom from the tyranny of humans.”

 

Emily thought rather hysterically that between the storybook villain speech and the eye scorching costume (seriously was he colorblind) she should be laughing instead of so frightened she can barely stand, but she knows who he is.  Knows that three months ago this Magneto nearly killed the president and Sara has no blue hero to save her.  She is jerked in the air suspended from metal wrapped around her wrists and ankles.  

 

“Now tell me how to free them.”

 

“I don’t know who you mean.  There isn’t anyone else here.”

 

Magneto narrows his eyes and her arms and legs jerk apart and she feels her shoulder dislocate as he pulls on her bonds.  Through her own scream she hears a tiny voice yell, “No! Not my mommy!”

 

Everything around Emily is levitating, her desk, her chair, and a fleet of office supplies.  They hang suspended for less time than it takes to inhale and then fly like lightning before thunder.  The helmet falls in pieces pierced dozens of times.  The autopsy of the terrorist called Magneto puts his cause of death as the pencil lodged so deeply in his eye that only the eraser was visible, but truthfully it could have been caused by any one of a hundred punctures to his face, neck, lungs, heart, and skull.    Not one of Sara’s projectiles even grazed Emily.

 

The funeral takes place on a Monday.  Charles and Alex attend.  Raven and Hank do not.

 

Sara and Emily walk knock on the front door of the mansion the next Wednesday.  Emily becomes the school’s secretary and benevolent administrative dictator.  Sara becomes the reason Charles is once again excited to teach.  He never forgets how Erik dies, but it only makes him grateful that this child shows no signs of becoming the next Magneto, the next Shaw.

 

Charles hands Sara her diploma on a Saturday.  Sunday is Mother’s Day and Emily hangs her present, a framed picture of the school’s staff and students, next to a framed acceptance letter to Harvard.  Sara wants to become the first mutant president.  Emily thinks Monday, January 21st, 2013 sounds perfect.


End file.
